User perception towards Open Source Operating Systems with special reference to GNU/Linux

It is almost twenty years after GNU/Linux has beenoverblown. Still the market figures of Linux use are at veryabysmal levels. In spite of the maturity and adoption, Linux isstill remained as a second hand option for many users across theworld. Linux has many advantages compared to its counterpartsin the market and unlike any other proprietary operating system;some of the distributions are available for users as full featuredsoftware (wholesome OS). Even though Linux is proved to be bestsoftware in server market, the desktop market remained feeble.The market share of Linux is only laying less than 2% but rest isshared by all other operating systems. Windows alone attribute toapproximately 85% of market share. Under the commonmarketing tenet that if a product is not adopted by market then itmight be that, the users in the market either might not be awareof it or if they are aware, might not like it, or if they like it andstill don’t use then it is the problem of availability, but this is notthe problem to Linux. It is available freely (as a source code)from the respective websites and users across the world arefamiliar. Then where is the problem? Exactly here the need forthis study arises. User perception is one of the importantattributes which characterizes market share. In this study asurvey was done to know if expertise of individuals influencestheir perception towards Linux. A hypothesis was formulated totest if any dependency exists in between these two variables(namely individual expertise and their perception towardsLinux). It was found that the two variables are not significantlydifferent; which means expertise of individuals significantlyinfluences their perception towards Linux.